Sunday, August 28, 2016

Is the death penalty "too broken to fix"?

The imposition of the death penalty — from
prosecution to sentencing — has become a rarity mostly confined to a very small
number of counties in America, reported BuzzFeed.com.

This point about counties was highlighted by Justice
Stephen Breyer — with maps — in a 2015 dissenting opinion he wrote in a
death penalty challenge relating to execution drugs.

“Geography also plays an important role in determining
who is sentenced to death. And that is not simply because some States permit
the death penalty while others do not. Rather within a death penalty
State, the imposition of the death penalty heavily de­pends on the county in
which a defendant is tried,” he wrote at the time.

Now, a project out of Harvard Law School is
attempting to explain why those counties exist — and how those counties
exemplify larger problems that critics of the death penalty have described
regarding the punishment.

The Fair Punishment Project has begun analyzing the
16 counties that imposed five or more death sentences between 2010 and 2015
and, on Tuesday, is releasing its first of two reports on its research. “Too
Broken to Fix: Part I,” about half of those counties, details the common
problems it has found throughout the eight counties. Those problems — as
detailed and defined by the Fair Punishment Project include: overzealous
prosecution, inadequate defense, racial bias and exclusion, excessive
punishments, and innocence.

Notably, this county-level diminishment of the death
penalty across much of the nation has happened on the front end of the death
penalty process while the end of the process — the pace of executions in
America — has slowed
nearly to a standstill: Only one execution has taken place in the entire
country since May 11.

At the other extreme, one county in Arizona —
Maricopa County — had 28 death sentences imposed between 2010 and 2015.

The county, according to the Fair Punishment
Project’s findings, stands out for its stark examples of the problems found
across the counties that most often sentence people to death. The county, which
includes Phoenix, is one of the largest in the nation and is perhaps best known
for its chief law enforcement officer, Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio’s harsh
tactics against undocumented immigrants and other groups and support for racial
profiling — policies often challenged successfully in court — have kept the
county’s law enforcement efforts in the national news in recent years.

About Matt

An analysis of crime and punishment from the perspective of a former prosecutor and current criminal justice practitioner.
The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or postions of any county, state or federal agency.